Marjorie grew up in Winchelsea in country Victoria, Australia, dreaming of becoming an opera star like Dame Nellie Melba. In 1928 she went to Paris to study opera without knowing a word of French and having never heard of Richard Wagner. In 1941, at the height her success, she was tragically cut down by polio and became completely paralysed. With the help of Australian nurse, Sister Kenny, Marjorie regained movement in her upper body and resumed her career in a wheelchair. In 1955, MGM made a movie of her life, "Interrupted Melody", starring Eleanor Parker and Glenn Ford, which won an Academy Award.
The Spanish sculptor meditates about his life and work
William Shatner performs a concert of biographical songs that take the audience into the reality of his life and career: from STAR TREK to BOSTON LEGAL. Shatner sings in front of a live audience with Ben Folds, Brad Paisley and Joe Jackson. Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew and Candice Bergen make cameos.
Raffael – Ein sterblicher Gott
Lost and Found depicts a life of a man with no homeland. 10 years ago Konstantin G fled the persecutions of homosexuals from Moscow to Finland. He lives now in Helsinki, living the different roles of his life: he is a nurse and a friend of the aged, a bright personality of the nightlife in Helsinki's gay-world, a solitary figure of the Russian community and the Orthodox Church, and as well as an intensive cabaret performer. Film is a mosaic-like journey to the loves and lives of Konstantin, where poems, songs and encounters form a picture of one passionate and unusual life. In the roles of his own life Konstantin Gontcharev.
Since the beginning of her career, Sinéad O’Connor has used her powerful voice to challenge the narratives she was surrounded by while growing up in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland. Despite her agency, depth and perspective, O’Connor’s unflinching refusal to conform means that she has often been patronized and unfairly dismissed as an attention-seeking pop star.
At the age of 91, Mel Brooks is unstoppable, with his musical "Young Frankenstein" opening to great critical acclaim in London in late 2017. Alan Yentob visits Mel at home in Hollywood, at work and at play.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman and Turkish army officer, revolutionary statesman, writer, and the first President of Turkey. He is credited with being the founder of the Republic of Turkey. His surname, Atatürk (meaning "Father of the Turks"), was granted to him in 1934 and forbidden to any other person by the Turkish parliament.
Beethoven Reloaded
Narrated by Linda Hunt, this documentary examines the life of the late author and gay rights activist Paul Monette. Born in 1945 to a well-off Massachusetts family, Monette grows up unable to accept his homosexuality, for years hiding it from his loved ones while struggling to develop as a writer. In 1978, Monette publishes his first novel, which allows him to come out to his parents. After losing one lover to AIDS in 1986, he becomes a ferocious advocate for awareness of the disease.
Documentary about veteran character actor Dick Miller, whose career in and outside of Hollywood has spanned almost 200 films across six decades, featuring a diverse range of interviews with directors, co-stars, and contemporaries.
An imagined apocalypse is presented to us through portraits of people struggling to survive in a hostile environment, where they only have themselves and the only thing they have in common is the desire to live, no matter the cost.
On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Louis de Funès, this documentary by Jacques Pessis pays tribute to the cult actor by retracing his career through excerpts of his greatest successes in the cinema and in the music hall, never-before-seen archives, as well as testimonies from personalities and relatives.
A single mom creates an unlikely weapon in the fight for world peace after her best friend a soldier, is axed in the head by a terrorist. Only now she finds herself in the battle of her life taking on corporate giants.
Werner Herzog's documentary film about the "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in one man's attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.
Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematographic images that intensify the fictional context of the film. Abramovic plays herself, but ,appearing in multiple forms, blurs her own identity. Memories and fantasies intermingle with day to day rituals. The chronological narrative often breaks to reflect the interior voyage of the protagonist from the present to the past and back to the present. The result is a visually impressive film. Balkan Baroque had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 1999.
Enrico Macias, de l'amour plein la tête
Pasolini, el poeta en la playa
The subversive masterpieces of Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel challenged the reality of life under rising totalitarianism, and led to his arrest and execution in 1940. In Finding Babel, Andrei Malaev-Babel confronts complex traces of a turbulent history that echo in his grandfather's writing and in the conflicts of today's Ukraine and Russia. Babel's fiction is woven into Andrei's search with ethereal animation that puts the viewer, like Babel's readers, between fantasy and reality.
Ukraine in Flames is a documentary produced by Oliver Stone that reveals American and NATO participation in the 2014 coup d'état in Ukraine and its aftermath. The renowned American director, who in recent years has made several productions within the genre of political cinema, investigates the origins of the current conflict that currently keeps the entire European continent and the entire planet in suspense. In the film, Stone interviews, among others, the former president of Ukraine, Víktor Yanukovych; Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Ukrainian Interior Minister Vitali Zajarchenko.